This is a difficult time for our campus community.  We are presented with an "Economic Crisis" and told to pull in our belts, make do as best we can and do more with less - both in people and resources - but then staff and faculty find that this applies only to some, not to all.  It is a sad commentary that we are laying people off and doing away with much needed positions in order to give raises to a few.
As far as support staff are concerned, there are fewer of us to support you than there were five years ago; there will be fewer still in a few months.   Our salaries are woefully low and there is no end in sight.  Last year we had a "huge victory" in the salary arena by actually receiving a 2% raise OR an increase to match the health insurance increase.  Much has been made of that, but imagine not even making enough wage so that a 2% raise doesn't cover an increase in the cost of insurance?  At the time I was very pleased to be a part of the Budget Committee that made this possible for our non-exempt and felt that perhaps more headway could be made in the future, but that is when I believed that we were ALL in this together - trying to make things better for a campus that is overburdened and under funded by the state.
As I look back over the last three and one half years of being Chair of the ERC, I see that we have not moved toward equitable salaries.  Any salary increases have been offset by an unfathomable increase in work load, insurance costs and an attitude from above that we "just have to find a way to do it all".  It is no wonder that as I speak with others across campus: support staff, exempt staff and faculty alike, the attitude and morale is overwhelmingly poor.   I would never begrudge someone a raise, but there are so many of us who are underpaid and now there is the problem of  how money can be found when it is wanted, but not when it is needed.


Julia S. Cronin
Student Employment Coordinator
UTC - Financial Aid Office
Chair - Employee Relations Committee
615 McCallie Avenue
Chattanooga, TN 37403-2592
423-425-5360
FAX: 423-425-2292

At 09:47 AM 8/29/03 -0500, Gregory O'Dea wrote:
>Stepping up to the plate...
>
>I thought, perhaps idealistically, that the heat was on UTC's administrative
>leadership when the news broke about the Chancellor's new assistant earning
>$83,900. Apparently that uproar had little effect, for now we read of
>significant raises in still more administrative salaries, even in this time
>of supposedly dire fiscal forecasts.
>
>I don't begrudge people the ability to command whatever salary they can get.
>It seems that the Chancellor's new assistant is very qualified for and
>experienced in the duties she is about to assume, and I don't doubt that the
>nine administrators listed in today's newspaper work very hard and do very
>well. My concern has more to do with this latest indication of very skewed
>administrative priorities at UTC. We hear again and again about the terrible
>state of salary compression for both faculty and staff, about the need for
>tuition raises, fairly brutal department and program budget cuts, frozen
>hiring lines, larger class sizes, paltry adjunct pay and conditions, and so
>forth - all terrible hits that the academic division of the university
>"must" sustain - and yet these same principles of ascetic fiscal restraint
>and sacrifice seem not to apply to the administrative levels of the
>University. This business of the Assistant to the Chancellor and other
>administrative raises is just one small instance of a growing pattern that
>all of us should find very alarming.
>
>To use myself as a comparative example (and only because I know my own
>situation best): I've been at UTC for 13 years and hold the rank of UC
>Foundation Associate Professor. I teach well. I keep up my scholarship and
>professional activities. I work very hard on a lot of committees. I  serve
>the community with my expertise. For all of that, according to the latest
>figures on faculty salaries, I earn about 20% less than the average
>ASSISTANT professor at UTC. And that figure includes the boost from the UC
>Foundation Professorship. If I made HALF of what the Chancellor's Assistant
>will take in, I'd be enjoying a 5% raise. I'm sure most of my colleagues can
>share similar stories and figures.
>
>All of that simply to illustrate what we already know is a remarkable
>imbalance in salaries. Old news. But more, I take these recent raises to be
>merely the latest actions in a pattern of disregard for fiscal priorities.
>If we can't get significant across the board raises, if we can't do anything
>right now about salary compression, if we must have larger classes and
>deliver compromised instruction to our students, if we must have
>departmental travel budgets stripped, perhaps we can at least ask that the
>folks in Founders Hall not add insult to injury quite so often or so glibly.
>
>Thanks for listening,
>
>Greg O'Dea
>
>--
>Dr. Gregory O'Dea
>UC Foundation Associate Professor of English
>Interim Director of University Honors
>The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
>Chattanooga, TN 37403  USA
>
>
>
>On 08/29/03 8:32 AM, "maggie mcmahon" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Thank you Verbie for your Raven post.  I commend you for being able to write
>> cogently to an issue that leaves many choking with disbelief and then
>> frustration.  Well over 1mil has been wasted in the UT Presidency debacle in
>> not much more than a year.  Over the past several years, the art department
>> has lost administrative support (funding) for lab assistants and other vital
>> staff positions.  In the last ten years many if not most have lost income
>> relative to inflation and "are doing the jobs of at least two people". The
>> chancellor's last raise was more than my annual salary. The formula for
>> parity faculty salaries with peer instructions is a joke.  Administrators
>> rate 100% parity while the people who do the teaching and advising should
>> "understand" that times are tough. Why has Raven been so quiet?
>> My colleagues at UTK and MTSU do not share my exhibition record, years of
>> tenure or rank, yet earn more.
>> I encourage all tenured faculty to use the Raven forum to publicly log their
>> oft privately stated frustration. If there were ever a time to step up to
>> the plate folks, it's now.
>> Maggie McMahon
>> UC Foundation Professor
>> Art Department
>> University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
>>